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by JohnMakin 54 days ago
I think to his credit he wasn't always like this, but I consider this the opposite side of the coin of what is commonly called AI psychosis - AI psychosis, I define, as an unreasonable or unrealistic view of AI and its capabilities.

I used to be very bearish, my posting history indicates so - but not quite to the degree zitron did. I was just bearish on all the "developers will be gone by 2026" hype kind of thing, I adopted LLM use as soon as it was available and it has been in some part of my workflow since then, and I have watched it improve, so I took a similar view as you. The breaking point though, is sometime in the last 6 months I believe that something fundamentally changed and they became very good to use in almost every part of my workflow now, which I could not do before.

I dont know whether the skeptic psychosis is a thing innate to certain types of people, or if AI itself kind of encourages it, or a combination of both. Same with the other side of it, the people unrealistic about what it can do, or think it's become conscious, that kind of thing. I can see as I use it more myself, I am kind of becoming more optimistic than I probably should about what it can do, and then I stop myself, usually because something breaks.

But I've seen people, coworkers especially, go through that curve of "oh my god I'm gonna use it for everything" and then hit that "break," where it does something awful, and then jump right on over to the extreme like "this can never be useful." I wish people had more pragmatic views about it.

1 comments

Agreed. Current frontier LLMs tend to be jagged and brittle in ways which are remarkably hard for humans to reason about. They appear so smart in virtually all the ways humans have traditionally estimated intelligence in other humans (concrete knowledge, verbal fluidity, etc) until you suddenly slam full-speed into a seemingly invisible wall. I just tell people to think of them as 'alien intelligences' which are modeling human behavior from external observation while in reality sharing less in common with us than even mammals or reptiles.